nytimes.com
Why the Evidence Suggests Russia Blew Up
the Kakhovka Dam
James Glanz, Marc Santora, Pablo Robles, Haley Willis, Lauren Leatherby, Christoph Koettl,
Dmitriy Khavin
12–15 minutes
Even in a war that has razed entire cities, the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam in
southern Ukraine stands out.
Thousands of people were displaced by flooding from one of the world’s largest reservoirs,
which was vital for irrigating farmland considered the breadbasket of Europe. The disaster puts
global food supplies for millions at risk and could threaten fragile ecosystems for decades.
The dam was visibly scarred by fighting in the months before the breach. Ukrainian strikes had
damaged one part of the roadway over the dam, and retreating Russian troops later blew up
another. Last month, satellite images showed water flowing uncontrolled over some of the gates.
This has led to suggestions that the dam may have merely fallen victim to the accumulated
damage, which Russia has seized on to deny responsibility.
But multiple lines of evidence reviewed by The New York Times, from original engineering
plans to interviews with engineers who study dam failures, support a different explanation: that
the collapse of the dam was no accident. The catastrophic failure of its underlying concrete
foundation was very unlikely to occur on its own.
Given the satellite and seismic detections of explosions in the area, by far the most likely cause
of the collapse was an explosive charge placed in the maintenance passageway, or gallery, that
runs through the concrete heart of the structure, according to two American engineers, an expert
in explosives and a Ukrainian engineer with extensive experience with the dam’s operations.
“If your objective is to destroy the dam itself, a large explosion would be required,” said Michael
W. West, a geotechnical engineer and expert in dam safety and failure analysis, who is a retired
principal at the engineering firm Wiss, Janney, Elstner. “The gallery is an ideal place to put that
explosive charge.”
A satellite image showing the dam three days before its destruction. Pléiades Neo Airbus DS
2023
Engineers cautioned that only a full examination of the dam after the water drains from the
reservoir can determine the precise sequence of events leading to the destruction. Erosion from
water cascading through the gates could have led to a failure if the dam were poorly designed, or
the concrete was substandard, but engineers called that unlikely.
Ihor Strelets, an engineer who served as the deputy head of water resources for the Dnipro River
from 2005 until 2018, said that as a Cold War construction project, the dam’s foundation was
designed to withstand almost any kind of external attack. Mr. Strelets said he, too, had concluded
that an explosion within the gallery destroyed part of the concrete structure, and that other
sections then were torn away by the force of the water.
“I do not want my theory to be correct,” Mr. Strelets said. A large explosion in the gallery might
mean the total loss of the dam. “But that is the only explanation,” he said.
Waking to Water
In the predawn hours of June 6, residents living close to the dam in both Russian-controlled and
Ukrainian-controlled territory heard explosions and strange rumblings, they said later.
They were no strangers to the sounds of fighting. For months, the two armies had traded artillery
volleys across the Dnipro River. But this time seemed different — and soon it was clear why.
For those closest to the dam, built in the 1950s by the Soviet state, the rush of water was almost
immediate. It took longer for the floods to make their way farther downriver, but when they did,
they came fast and then did not begin to subside for more than a week.
“We live on the fourth floor so it didn’t reach our apartment, but the first floor was completely
flooded,” said Vasyl, 64, who lives in the Russian-occupied east bank town of Hola Prystan,
about 60 miles from the dam, and was reached by phone.
A flooded residential area in the Russian-occupied town of Hola Prystan. Alexander
Ermochenko/Reuters
Neighbors and relatives have sought refuge in his apartment. “My sister’s house is completely
washed out,” Vasyl said. “It’s just the walls now, nothing inside, no furniture, no appliances.”
Most younger people in the town fled the Russian occupation long ago, he said, leaving behind
mostly elderly people, including many with disabilities. “Many of them drowned, as they
couldn’t leave their houses or climb to the roofs,” he said. The death toll from the flooding
remains unknown; officials say the numbers are likely to rise as the waters recede.
A Prime Target
The relatively spindly sluice gates and cranes and the ribbon of roadway above the water line
seemed to offer an easy target for an attack aimed at destroying the Kakhovka dam.
But most of the dam’s enormous mass was hidden below the surface of the water, according to
diagrams of the structure obtained by The Times and detailed descriptions by Mr. Strelets, who
said he has spent months at the Kakhovka dam and around the reservoir.
That mass consisted of a rounded tower of nearly solid concrete some 20 meters high and as
much as 40 meters thick at the bottom, Mr. Strelets said. Built in sections, that colossal barrier
ran between earthen embankments on either side of the channel and did much of the work of
holding back the waters of the reservoir.
The sluice gates sat atop that barrier, opening and closing to adjust the water level. Visual
evidence assembled by The Times shows clear damage to the roadway and to a few of the sluice
gates on one side of the channel in the months before the breach of the dam.
Despite that damage and a whitewater cascade tumbling from the vicinity of those gates,
engineers said the foundering of an entire section of the dam was more likely to be related to the
blasts picked up by seismic sensors and to an infrared signal that U.S. officials said was picked
up by a satellite, indicating the heat of an explosion.
The seismic signals were picked up on two sensors, one in Romania and one in Ukraine, and
occurred at 2:35 a.m. and 2:54 a.m. Ukraine time, said Ben Dando, a seismologist at Norsar, a
Norwegian organization that specializes in seismology and seismic monitoring. The signals were
both consistent with an explosion, Dr. Dando said — and not, say, the collapse of the dam on its
own.
He said that the network could determine the time of an explosion to within a couple of seconds,
but that the location of the blasts was less certain. For example, Norsar could locate the 2:54 a.m.
signal to have originated within a zone 20 or 30 kilometers across that included the dam.
A specific time stamp for the infrared signal was not available, but a senior U.S. military official
said that it was picked up shortly before the dam collapsed.
A senior American military official said that the United States had ruled out an external attack on
the dam, like a missile, bomb or some other projectile, and now assesses that the explosion came
from one or more charges set inside it, most likely by Russian operatives.
Floodwaters reached the rooftops of houses in Kherson, about 40 miles downstream from the
dam. Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
Gregory B. Baecher, an engineering professor at the University of Maryland and a member of
the National Academy of Engineers, also said the scale of the breach indicated that the
underlying concrete barrier had failed, suggesting that charges had been set deep in the structure.
“If they put explosives in the gallery, that would explain a lot,” Professor Baecher said. A large
explosion there, he said, “would just rip up all the concrete structure.”
Nick Glumac, an engineering professor and explosives expert at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, said the size of the necessary charge could vary widely depending on the
exact way in which the explosives were set and the precise objective.
“It’s worth remembering that you don’t have to pulverize the dam section, just break it enough
such that the water pressure is enough to tear it away,” Professor Glumac said.
Still, Professor Glumac said that based on diagrams of the dam and the latest imagery of the
destroyed foundation, “It’s hard for me to see how anything other than an internal explosion in
the passageway could account for the damage.” He added, “That’s a massive amount of concrete
to move.”
Using the gallery might have another advantage for anyone seeking to hide their tracks.
According to Mr. Strelets, the gallery had only two entrances, including one inside the machine
room located in a building to one side of the dam.
Dr. West, who is also a former Army combat engineer officer, noted that would allow the dam to
be rigged out of sight of spy satellites, drones or witnesses on the ground. Early morning drone
footage showed that the initial breach in the dam occurred not far from the machine room.
A satellite image showing the dam a day after its collapse. Maxar Technologies
Professor Baecher said it was possible, though unlikely, that water flow from the damaged gates
somehow undermined the concrete structure where it sat on the riverbed. But he said an
examination of the drawings indicated that the design had protected against that possibility with
standard measures. One of those is a so-called “apron” of concrete on top of the riverbed to the
downstream side of the dam.
“This appears to be a well-engineered dam of modern design,” he said.
For its part, the company that operated the dam said in a statement to The Times on June 16 that
“Russian forces made an internal explosion which resulted in destroying the dam.” That
explosion, the company said, “brought about uncontrolled release of water from the reservoir and
disastrous increase of water level in the downstream.”
A Dam in the Cross Hairs
The ravages of the dam since the Russians invaded Ukraine have been captured again and again
from overhead and on the ground.
As Russian troops were retreating across the Dnipro River in November 2022, they blew up the
roadway atop the structure’s northern end. A surveillance camera captured the powerful
nighttime explosion. Satellite images show that the force of the blast destroyed the roadway, but
that the dam’s foundation and the walls of the gates at that section of the dam were unaffected.
They remain standing today.
The Times obtained very high-resolution satellite imagery that also shows damage to another
section of the roadway in the days and weeks before the dam’s collapse. On June 1, or early on
June 2, part of the road that runs along the dam collapsed. Ukrainian HIMARS rocket strikes in
August 2022 damaged that part of the road but did not hit the dam.
On April 23, a small part of a wall connected to the power plant collapsed — possible evidence
of erosion near the dam.
Sources: Supernova+ via Telegram, Maxar Technologies, Pléiades Neo Airbus DS 2023.
Additionally, the cranes that control the release of water through the dam had not been moved
since mid-November, allowing water to flow unchecked out of the same gates over a period of
several months. This lack of regulation led the water level of the reservoir to reach its lowest
point in decades in February, then hit a 30-year high in May, just weeks before the dam’s
destruction.
Neither this previous damage, nor the pressure caused by the high water level or the static
position of the cranes is likely to have caused the collapse of the dam’s concrete foundation,
experts said, unless the concrete was of low quality and already prone to deteriorate. The large
flows would also be insufficient to undermine the dam’s foundation unless, for some reason, the
concrete apron — the downstream cover placed over the river bottom — contained flaws or the
soil was much softer than accounted for in the design.
A video that emerged this week, after water levels had dropped, provides clear evidence of the
catastrophic failure. It shows that the top of the concrete foundation, not just the gates, was
destroyed.
Source: Milinfolive via Telegram
Mr. Strelets, the engineer, called the gallery the Achilles’ heel of the Kakhovka dam. He said he
hoped a charge had not been put there, because the damage would be irreparable.
“I walked along this dam many times,” he said. “I was proud of it. It is the property of my
country. I never even imagined that someone would attempt to destroy it.”
nytimes.com
He Went After Crypto Companies. Then
Someone Came After Him.
John Carreyrou
22–28 minutes
The Great Read
Kyle Roche was a rising star in the field of cryptocurrency law — until his career imploded.
Who orchestrated his downfall?
In secretly recorded videos, the lawyer Kyle Roche described his close relationship with one of
his cryptocurrency clients.Credit...Gili Benita for The New York Times
June 18, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET
When he arrived in London in late January 2022, Kyle Roche was riding high. At just 34 years
old, he had established himself as one of the biggest players in the burgeoning field of
cryptocurrency litigation. He boasted a law firm bearing his name, lawsuits filed against more
than a dozen crypto companies and a huge verdict against the man who claimed to have invented
Bitcoin.
Now a new opportunity beckoned. Two businessmen had flown Mr. Roche over from Miami to
discuss investing in a new business venture he was forming. A waiting car whisked him from
Heathrow Airport to meet the men in a plush townhouse in Mayfair.
That evening, Mr. Roche went to dinner with one of the men, who identified himself as Mauricio
Andres Villavicencio de Aguilar. Mr. Villavicencio, who said he was from Argentina, had
picked one of London’s fanciest restaurants, Jean-Georges in the Connaught hotel.
When he woke up the next morning, Mr. Roche says, he felt groggy. He couldn’t remember
much aside from being pretty sure he had spotted Mr. Villavicencio’s business partner, a
Norwegian named Christen Ager-Hanssen, lurking at a nearby table. The brain fog was odd
because he didn’t think he’d had all that much to drink. As he flew back to Miami a few days
later, Mr. Roche couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss.
Months passed. Then, one day last summer, Mr. Roche’s world detonated. A website called
Crypto Leaks posted two dozen videos of him that had been secretly recorded during his
meetings with Mr. Villavicencio and Mr. Ager-Hanssen.
The videos portrayed Mr. Roche and his law firm, Roche Freedman, as being in the pocket of
one of their crypto clients. In one clip, Mr. Roche revealed that the client, a company called Ava
Labs, had granted him tens of millions of dollars’ worth of its digital tokens, making him
beholden to the company and its founder, whom he likened to a “brother.”
In other clips, Mr. Roche made it sound like his sole concern, even when representing other
clients, was to promote Ava Labs’ interests. He bragged that he had managed to distract
regulators from looking into Ava Labs and suggested that his lawsuits against other crypto
companies were designed to harm Ava Labs’ competitors.
Image
Some of the videos were recorded while Mr. Roche had dinner with a supposed investor at a
restaurant in London’s Connaught Hotel.Credit...Joshua Bright for The New York Times
In the videos filmed at Jean-Georges, Mr. Roche looked intoxicated, waving his hands, cursing
and referring to jurors as “idiots.”
After he got over his initial shock, Mr. Roche realized he had a major problem on his hands. The
videos made him look corrupt. To defend himself, he published a piece on Medium saying they
had been “illegally obtained” and “spliced out of context,” and he denied being in cahoots with
Ava Labs.
It was too late. One after another, companies that Roche Freedman had sued filed motions to
disqualify the firm from their cases. In October, the first of those motions succeeded: A federal
judge in New York tossed Roche Freedman from a case it had filed against Tether, the operator
of the world’s most used “stablecoin.”
Within days, Mr. Roche was forced to resign from the law firm he had founded. With his career
in tatters, he says, he enrolled in ethics classes and began to see a therapist.
Mr. Roche was felled by his own loose lips and his overly cozy relationship with a client. But he
also was the victim of an elaborate international setup.
The question was: Who was behind it?
The New Sheriff
Mr. Roche grew up in a working-class family in Buffalo. The oldest of four siblings, he shared a
bedroom with intellectually disabled twin brothers. Watching them struggle with simple tasks
while he breezed through school made Mr. Roche feel both guilty and determined to succeed so
he could one day provide for them.
After attending Purdue University and working for a few years as a management consultant, he
enrolled at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law. During his first semester, in the
fall of 2013, he caught the crypto bug. Joe Delich, a classmate who later worked with Mr. Roche
at his law firm, remembers him constantly checking the price of Bitcoin on his laptop during
classes. Mr. Roche cashed out before a big price drop, earning about $100,000 in profits. He
used the money to pay his tuition.
As a third-year student, Mr. Roche collaborated with a professor on a paper discussing Bitcoin’s
virtues as the first currency free from government interference. That led to an opinion piece in
The Wall Street Journal.
“That was the first moment I thought, ‘Oh, wow, maybe I can do something with this,’” he said.
By then, Mr. Roche was a first-year associate at Boies Schiller Flexner, where he was developing
a reputation as the kid who understood crypto. When a colleague in Miami approached him a
few days after the Journal piece with a Bitcoin-related case, he jumped at the opportunity.
The case pitted a man named Ira Kleiman against Craig Wright, the Australian computer
scientist who claims to be Bitcoin’s enigmatic creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Mr. Kleiman wanted
to sue Dr. Wright for defrauding his brother David, a paraplegic computer forensics expert who
had died in his mid-40s, out of billions of dollars of Bitcoin they supposedly mined together in
Bitcoin’s early days.
The facts were murky: There was evidence that Dr. Wright and David Kleiman had indeed been
friends, and David Kleiman had been known to carry around his neck an encrypted hard drive
that might or might not have contained the passwords to Bitcoin wallets. But many people
considered Dr. Wright a fraud, calling into question the notion that he had mined early blocks of
Bitcoin, much less cheated someone out of them.
To Mr. Roche, that was one of the allures of the case. If he could make Dr. Wright hand over his
files during discovery, he might be able to solve Bitcoin’s great enduring mystery: Satoshi
Nakamoto’s true identity. Mr. Roche and his young Miami colleague, Velvel Freedman, were
soon devoting most of their time to the case.
In 2019, with the Kleiman case slowly progressing toward a trial, Mr. Roche met a new client,
who was locked in a dispute with a crypto company. In a matter of days, he negotiated a
lucrative settlement on the client’s behalf. As a token of his gratitude, the client agreed to invest
$7.5 million with Mr. Roche and Mr. Freedman so they could start their own law firm. At first,
Mr. Roche set up shop in a co-working space in Brooklyn, but when the pandemic hit he joined
Mr. Freedman in Miami.
Their firm, Roche Freedman, soon made a splash. Mr. Roche had watched with increasing
skepticism as a number of crypto start-ups rode Bitcoin’s growing popularity by marketing new
digital coins that surged in value and then crashed. It reminded him of pump-and-dump scams in
which a group inflates the price of a stock by talking it up publicly before selling all at once and
making off with the profits.
Regulators didn’t seem to be doing anything about it, so Mr. Roche decided he would. On April
3, 2020, Roche Freedman filed lawsuits seeking class action status against seven issuers of
digital coins, alleging they had pumped what amounted to unregistered securities with false
statements and then dumped them, leaving retail investors holding the bag.
It also sued four crypto exchanges for enabling the coin issuers’ conduct, foreshadowing some of
the legal arguments the Securities and Exchange Commission used to sue Binance and Coinbase
this month. (Binance and Coinbase have vowed to fight the S.E.C. in court.)
Those suits were just an opening salvo: Sixteen months later, Mr. Roche filed his biggest
securities fraud case yet. It alleged that a British entrepreneur, Dominic Williams, and entities he
controlled had swindled investors out of billions of dollars by aggressively promoting, and then
dumping, a digital coin tied to a grandiose plan to revolutionize computing.
Mr. Williams had boldly proclaimed that his Internet Computer blockchain — a decentralized
network of computers powered by a digital token called ICP — would supplant the big cloud
services offered by Amazon and Microsoft and become humanity’s primary computing platform.
But after an initial surge that briefly made it one of the most valuable cryptocurrencies, ICP had
plummeted 92 percent — a collapse that Mr. Roche’s lawsuit attributed to “massive” selling by
Mr. Williams and other insiders. (Mr. Williams denied the allegations.)
If crypto was the Wild West of finance, Mr. Roche had announced himself as the new sheriff.
But sheriffs, as he would soon learn, make enemies.
A Big Verdict
Image
Emin Gun Sirer runs Ava Labs, a crypto firm that gave Mr. Roche an equity stake and digital
coins worth millions at their peak.Credit...Matthew Busch/Bloomberg
Around the time Mr. Roche was working on his first pump-and-dump lawsuits, he befriended
Emin Gun Sirer, a Cornell University computer science professor who was hatching a
cryptocurrency project of his own in the Brooklyn co-working space where Mr. Roche initially
worked. Mr. Roche agreed to do legal work for Dr. Sirer’s company, Ava Labs, in exchange for
an equity stake and a small percentage of the cryptocurrency tokens it planned to issue.
Such arrangements aren’t uncommon in the tech industry. Mr. Roche’s former boss David Boies
had struck a similar one with Theranos, the blood-testing company whose founder, Elizabeth
Holmes, was later convicted of fraud. The scandals involving Theranos and another client,
Harvey Weinstein, had badly tarnished Mr. Boies’s reputation, but to Mr. Roche he remained a
role model.
When Mr. Roche reached his deal with Dr. Sirer in September 2019, he says, there was no
guarantee that Dr. Sirer’s project would be successful. At the time, the tokens granted to him
were valued at less than 3 cents each.
A year later, Dr. Sirer’s blockchain, Avalanche, went live. As crypto fever spread, its AVAX
tokens rocketed to more than $100, making Mr. Roche a multimillionaire.
Mr. Roche’s compensation agreement with Ava Labs was supposed to be confidential, but
anyone who wanted to gather intel on him would soon be able to find out about it. In February
2021, Roche Freedman fired one of its partners, Jason Cyrulnik. He hit back with a lawsuit that
disclosed each partner’s share of the AVAX tokens.
That fall, Kleiman v. Wright went to trial in U.S. District Court in Miami. Mr. Roche gave a
fiery opening statement during which he repeatedly pointed an accusatory finger at Dr. Wright.
In the end, the trial didn’t resolve whether Dr. Wright had really invented Bitcoin, but the jury
ordered him to pay $100 million in damages to a company Ira Kleiman had inherited from his
dead brother. (The judge later tacked on $43 million in interest.) Mr. Roche and Mr. Freedman
toasted over cocktails at a Miami restaurant. Their law firm stood to make more than $10
million.
With the Kleiman trial over, Mr. Roche turned to a project he and Dr. Sirer had been discussing:
Ryval, a company that would help people raise money on Avalanche to pay for lawsuits. Mr.
Roche saw it as a GoFundMe for litigation and thought it could level the legal playing field
between individuals and big corporations.
But while he was plotting his new venture, someone was plotting his downfall.
The Setup
Image
Christen Ager-Hanssen, a Norwegian venture capitalist, was one of the men who invited Mr.
Roche to London.Credit...Shutterstock
In December 2021, Mr. Roche received an email from someone he trusted introducing him to
Mr. Villavicencio, according to a copy of the message reviewed by The New York Times. Mr.
Villavicencio presented himself as an associate of Mr. Ager-Hanssen, a venture capitalist who
was interested in Mr. Roche’s new project. Mr. Roche had no idea who the two men were, but he
welcomed the approach: He was raising money for Ryval, which had received some attention in
the crypto press.
After an introductory Zoom call, Mr. Roche agreed to fly to London at the men’s expense the
next month.
They met at Mr. Ager-Hanssen’s townhouse office, where things soon took a strange turn:
According to Mr. Roche, Mr. Ager-Hanssen pressed his index finger to Mr. Roche’s forehead —
“I didn’t think it was a gun motion, but I thought he was trying to intimidate me” — and said that
if he was going to invest with him, he needed to know everything Mr. Roche was capable of.
In hindsight, Mr. Roche wishes he had gotten up and left. Instead, he took it as a cue to sell
himself harder. According to Mr. Roche, Mr. Ager-Hanssen spent the next couple of hours
goading him into bragging about his relationship with Ava Labs while Mr. Villavicencio, who
was sitting across a table from him, secretly filmed him.
Armed with the information he had gleaned from the lawsuit filed by the fired Roche Freedman
partner, Mr. Ager-Hanssen coaxed Mr. Roche into saying he had been granted 1 percent of the
supply of Avalanche’s AVAX tokens. At the time, that would have been equivalent to more than
$100 million. (Mr. Roche says he exaggerated the 1 percent figure, and AVAX tokens have since
lost 80 percent of their value.)
Mr. Ager-Hanssen then asked Mr. Roche to give examples of how he had made himself useful to
Ava Labs executives.
“They haven’t been sued yet, and there’s a reason for that,” said the baby-faced Mr. Roche,
wearing a blazer over a button-down shirt and sweater, according to a video clip from the
meeting.
“Brilliant,” Mr. Ager-Hanssen replied. “Good answer.”
Mr. Roche later elaborated. “I deal with making sure that the S.E.C. and the C.F.T.C. have other
magnets to go after,” he said, referring to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. He
added, “Litigation can be a tool” to attack competition. “It’s a fantastic tool.”
Image
An image of Mr. Roche at Mr. Ager-Hanssen’s office from one of the videos posted on the
Crypto Leaks website. Credit...Crypto Leaks
That night, when Mr. Roche got to Jean-Georges, he says, he found Mr. Villavicencio at a table
and a drink waiting for him. Mr. Roche recalls Mr. Ager-Hanssen arriving about 15 minutes later
and sitting at a nearby table with a tall blond man. Mr. Roche says the rest of the evening was a
blur. He now believes the drink was laced with a drug, though he has no proof.
In one video clip from the restaurant, Mr. Roche revels in his power to crush companies with
lawsuits. In another, Mr. Villavicencio asks him whether Ava Labs has sued any of its
competitors. Mr. Roche replies, “No, they have me do that on behalf of the class,” suggesting
that he filed his class actions against other crypto companies at Ava Labs’ behest.
After the dinner at Jean-Georges, Mr. Roche never saw Mr. Villavicencio again, though he did
meet one last time with Mr. Ager-Hanssen in New York.
On Aug. 26, Mr. Roche was in California to attend a wedding when one of his clients came
across the Crypto Leaks videos on Twitter and sent him a link.
Blindsided, he scrambled to understand when and where they had been recorded. Once he pieced
it together, he called Mr. Freedman and reached out to clients to do damage control.
Mr. Roche’s biggest worry was his comments suggesting he had filed lawsuits to harm Ava
Labs’ competitors and to distract regulators. It was baseless bluster, he now says, blaming the
blue-collar kid in him who was trying to impress a prospective investor. He says he started
putting together the first lawsuits a month before he met Dr. Sirer, the Ava Labs founder.
Dr. Sirer denied that he or Ava Labs had anything to do with those lawsuits, some of which he
said he strongly disagreed with. Six weeks before Crypto Leaks published its videos, Ava Labs’
general counsel wrote an article criticizing one of the Roche Freedman lawsuits as “scurrilous.”
To insulate his law firm, Mr. Roche recused himself from the lawsuits Roche Freedman had filed
against crypto companies, sold his stake in Ava Labs back to the company and stopped
representing it. (Mr. Roche declined to say whether he profited on the sale.)
When it became clear that wouldn’t be enough, he resigned from his firm, which was renamed
Freedman Normand Friedland.
‘Someone That Doesn’t Exist’
Image
Mr. Roche beneath the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn, where he retreated for a while after the
videos appeared in August.Credit...Gili Benita for The New York Times
A week after the videos surfaced, Mr. Roche got another jolt: A friend of one of his colleagues
reported that he had heard rumors at a crypto event that Mr. Roche’s life was in danger,
according to an affidavit later filed in court. Spooked, Mr. Roche and his fiancée hunkered down
in a short-term rental in Brooklyn.
Mr. Roche felt that his world was unraveling. He says he became so stressed that he stopped
eating and lost 10 pounds. After several weeks, he and his fiancée returned to Miami but, still
worried for their safety, moved to an apartment leased under a relative’s name.
While Mr. Roche’s career imploded, Mr. Ager-Hanssen called for Mr. Roche’s disbarment and
tweeted about a report he had compiled on Mr. Roche that largely repeated the Crypto Leaks
allegations. He also emailed Mr. Cyrulnik, the former Roche Freedman partner, and offered to
help him prove his case against Mr. Roche and his former firm.
To Mr. Roche, the implication was clear: Mr. Ager-Hanssen had set him up.
In an interview, Mr. Ager-Hanssen denied that. “This was not an operation run by me at all,” he
said. “It was run by someone else.” He said that he had been genuinely interested in investing in
Ryval, that Mr. Villavicencio had filmed the videos at his office without his knowledge and that
he wasn’t at Jean-Georges that night. Mr. Ager-Hanssen said he thought he knew who was
behind the operation, but he wouldn’t reveal the person’s identity.
Mr. Villavicencio, for his part, seems to have disappeared. Attempts to reach him at the phone
number and email address he gave Mr. Roche were unsuccessful.
Mr. Ager-Hanssen said he didn’t know Mr. Villavicencio’s whereabouts. He said he had met the
man only a few weeks before Mr. Roche came to London and allowed that Villavicencio was
probably not his real name. “Of course, it’s someone that doesn’t exist,” he said.
But Mr. Ager-Hanssen, in addition to running his venture capital firm, has long had a sideline
digging up dirt on behalf of wealthy clients entangled in business disputes in Britain and
Scandinavia.
On multiple occasions, he has secretly recorded his targets. For example, in a 2014 interview, he
recounted how he had snared the adversary of a Swedish financier with a hidden microphone and
boasted that he employed former intelligence officers from the C.I.A., MI6 and Mossad.
But if Mr. Ager-Hanssen did set Mr. Roche up, who hired him to do it — and why?
A Series of Clues
Image
Dominic Williams, a British entrepreneur and a target of one of Mr. Roche’s lawsuits, said he
appreciated Crypto Leaks’ reports.Credit...Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile, via Getty Images
Plenty of people had reason to celebrate Mr. Roche’s downfall.
First in line were Dr. Wright, the man who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, and Calvin Ayre, a
gambling tycoon who bankrolls Dr. Wright. Dr. Wright quickly sought to exploit the videos,
filing an unsuccessful motion to disqualify Roche Freedman from the Kleiman case. And after
the videos came out, Mr. Ager-Hanssen became chief executive of nChain, a company that Mr.
Ayre funds and that employs Dr. Wright as chief science officer.
Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Ayre acknowledged that he and Dr. Wright were “pleased” when
the videos came out. But they denied having anything to do with the London sting.
Mr. Roche believes them because he thinks he knows who hired Mr. Ager-Hanssen: Mr.
Williams, the British entrepreneur who was the target of Roche Freedman’s biggest pump-anddump lawsuit.
A series of clues, documented by his former law firm in court filings, led Mr. Roche to that
conclusion. The first is that on May 12, 2022, Mr. Williams wrote on Twitter that he was
“coming for” his critics. That was the same day the cryptoleaks.info domain name was
registered.
Then, on June 9, 2022, the Crypto Leaks website went live. Billing itself as the defender of “the
honest crypto community,” it posted two reports that aligned with Mr. Williams’s interests. The
first espoused a complicated theory about the ICP token crash that Mr. Williams had previously
floated on Twitter.
The second attacked The Times for an article it had published about the crash. Mr. Williams
tweeted a link to that Crypto Leaks report, calling it “Gobsmacking.” The Dfinity Foundation, a
Swiss nonprofit that Mr. Williams created to oversee his blockchain, has since sued The Times
for defamation in New York. The Times is seeking to dismiss the suit.
The videos of Mr. Roche were the crux of Crypto Leaks’ third exposé. After they were
published, Mr. Williams and Dfinity filed a motion to disqualify Roche Freedman as plaintiffs’
counsel in the pump-and-dump lawsuit, saying Mr. Roche’s comments demonstrated “a
disregard for the integrity of the judicial system.”
In court filings opposing the motion, Mr. Roche’s former firm accused Mr. Williams of being
behind Crypto Leaks and said the videos filmed at Jean-Georges showed signs of deepfake
alterations. It also blamed Mr. Williams for the rumored death threats against Mr. Roche.
Pete Padovano, a spokesman for Dfinity and Mr. Williams, denied that anyone at the foundation
had made death threats. Asked if he was connected to Crypto Leaks, Mr. Williams said, “We
appreciate the coverage of Crypto Leaks and believe their articles speak for themselves.”
Mr. Roche spent last fall lying low, but he has recently begun to rebuild his career as a solo
practitioner.
In April, he won a $12.5 million verdict on behalf of six former Cantor Fitzgerald partners who
sued the Wall Street firm for withholding some of their compensation. The judgment, which
Cantor has appealed, opened the way for Mr. Roche to file a separate class action against the
firm. Mr. Roche is also representing dozens of investors in a dispute with Coinbase.
But Mr. Roche’s videotaped remarks continue to dog him and his former firm. Last month, the
judge overseeing the pump-and-dump case granted Mr. Williams’s motion and disqualified
Freedman Normand Friedland as plaintiffs’ counsel.
The judge cited Mr. Freedman’s continuing friendship with Mr. Roche — and the fact that they
together control a cryptocurrency wallet holding more than a million AVAX tokens. He also
voiced concern that the law firm was consumed by “extreme animosity” toward Mr. Williams,
which might lead it to turn down equitable settlement offers.
Unless the lead plaintiff can enlist new lawyers by August, the lawsuit is essentially dead. In Mr.
Roche’s view, the plot against him worked to perfection.
John Carreyrou is an investigative reporter on the Business desk. He is the author of the
bestselling book, “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup,” about Elizabeth
Holmes and Theranos. More about John Carreyrou
A version of this article appears in print on June 18, 2023, Section BU, Page 1 of the New York
edition with the headline: Who Was Out to Get This Man?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper |
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nytimes.com
Tips for Exercising in Humidity
Danielle Friedman
6–7 minutes
Credit...Justin J Wee for The New York Times
How to Exercise When It’s Humid
Working out in muggy weather can be brutal. Here are four ways to survive and thrive when it
feels like a sauna outside.
Credit...Justin J Wee for The New York Times

June 17, 2023
Anyone who has gone for a jog on a hot, muggy day knows how miserable it can be — not only
because your shirt is glued to your back, experts say, but also because humidity makes exercise
much more challenging.
This is because the sweat on your skin doesn’t easily evaporate, said JohnEric Smith, an
associate professor of exercise physiology at Mississippi State University. Sweat itself doesn’t
cool you, he said, but rather the evaporation of sweat. When the air is already thick with water
vapor, however, “there’s nowhere for the moisture on our skin to go,” he said.
As a result, humid air makes it harder for your body to cool down. This can cause the
cardiovascular system to become stressed, reducing blood flow to the muscles, and tires us more
quickly than in drier climes. While there isn’t much independent research on how humidity
affects the body, small studies on the topic have consistently found that athletes begin to tire
more quickly once the relative humidity reaches around 60 percent.
But this doesn’t mean you have to move all of your workouts inside if you live in an area that
feels like a sauna from June to September. Here are four things you can do to stay cooler in the
sticky summer months ahead.
Image
Credit...Justin J Wee for The New York Times
Give your body a couple weeks to adjust.
The more you exercise in both heat and humidity, the more your body will adapt and improve its
ability to cool itself, Dr. Smith said. (The same is true, only reversed, for cold weather.) But
because exercising in hot, humid weather is more taxing on the body than doing so in drier
conditions, it’s vital to give yourself time to adjust so you can prevent overheating and
exhaustion.
In just a few days, your body will begin to sweat more and sooner, which will help it regulate its
temperature, Dr. Smith said. You’ll even start to see an increase in blood volume, which benefits
your heart and circulation.
“You get big changes within the first few days of exposure,” he said, but “it takes generally
about two weeks to adapt well.”
When the weather becomes humid, Dr. Smith recommended doing shorter, gentler workouts that
slowly increase in duration and intensity over two to three weeks, until you’ve worked back up
to your previous exercise routine. If you typically run six miles at a 10-minute pace, scale back
to three miles at a 12-minute pace, and add speed and mileage as the humidity starts to feel less
oppressive.
Keep your skin cool.
Because humidity can raise your body temperature more than dry heat, it’s that much more
important to keep your skin cool while exercising, said Ahmad Munir Che Muhamed, an
associate professor of exercise physiology at the Science University of Malaysia who studies
how heat and humidity influence athletic performance.
Keep as much skin exposed to the air as possible while exercising, making it easier for sweat to
evaporate. (Make sure to wear sunscreen to prevent sun damage.) You should also avoid wearing
cotton clothing, he said, which holds moisture, creating a layer of insulation around your body.
Instead, wear clothes described as fast-drying or moisture-wicking.
Drying your skin with a towel or wiping sweat with your wet T-shirt may make you more
comfortable in the moment, but it’s actually interrupting the evaporation process, as it’s
removing moisture from your skin, Dr. Smith said. You may be better off letting the sweat drip
off you, as long as it’s not getting in your eyes.
And if you’re exercising in one spot — say, playing tennis or doing an outdoor boot camp —
mist yourself with cold water at regular intervals and dry off with a portable fan, recommended
Dr. Amy Beacom, a primary care sports medicine physician at the Mayo Clinic. If you’re
running, do this after a workout for quick relief.
Hydrate, but don’t overdo it.
Humid air can lead to dehydration. The less your sweat evaporates, the hotter you get and the
more you sweat, all of which depletes vital fluids and electrolytes such as sodium and potassium,
said Ronald Maughan, a visiting professor of exercise science at the University of St. Andrews in
Scotland.
Make sure to hydrate before you exercise, so you’re not going into a workout dehydrated. The
American Council on Exercise recommends drinking two to three cups of water a few hours
before you work out.
Once you’re moving, the Mayo Clinic recommends sipping fluids throughout, but ultimately
“drinking to thirst” to avoid overhydrating, which can dilute the sodium in your
blood and damage your kidneys.
Image
Credit...Justin J Wee for The New York Times
Think about when and where to exercise.
Humidity is highest in the morning in most places, before the sun dries out moisture in the
atmosphere. Start regularly checking the humidity level in your area at various times throughout
the day, and plan your workouts accordingly. Dr. Smith recommends The Weather Channel’s
app.
And when you can, choose a shady spot or path to exercise, Dr. Maughan said. When your body
is already working hard to not overheat in high humidity, exercising in direct sunlight is like
adding fuel to the fire. The heat, humidity, sun’s intensity and even wind all influence how you
feel outdoors, he said. “All of these different factors interact.”
Danielle Friedman is a journalist in New York and the author of “Let’s Get Physical: How
Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World.” @DFriedmanWrites